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sex workers

It’s 3:45am & I’m in Bangledesh. Just when I thought I was safe to take out my ear plugs, the prayer call thing started up again. Maybe tonight is a special occasion for some city-wide prayer meeting via the Goliath loudspeakers blaring outside my window.

It’s one thing to struggle with changing time zones & getting decent sleep with the blaring city-wide prayer call. It’s another thing to think about the babies & toddlers I met yesterday whose moms work in the largest brothel in Bangledesh. When I asked these moms about where they keep their babies when they work, 7/10 said that their babies & toddlers are on the bed with them as they work because these moms have no other option for their babies. And many of these are at risk from being abused by their moms clients.

So these babies & toddlers are NOT SAFE. Enter nightcare with Saving Moses. In nightcare, we provide a safe place for the babies & toddlers of sex workers to sleep while their moms work. We have been doing nightcare in Cambodia for almost 5 years & I’m super keen / eager to open nightcare here in Bangledesh.

The moms of these babies desperately want to keep their babies safe so they’d can keep a “fresh mind.” This was a quote from one of the moms I interviewed. It unraveled me.

There’s plenty of darkness in our world & lots of that darkness comes from letting hate & apathy into our hearts. For example, my friend was telling me about a brothel in Bangladesh where the underage workers are forced to take bovine steroids to force their bodies to develop & be more appealing to clients. Obviously, the steroids have very negative results on these girls’ bodies to say nothing about the babies born & toddlers raised in this environment. Truly, brothels like the one I described are dark & deplorable.

Enter nightcare with Saving Moses. In Cambodia, we have four nightcare centers where we look after the babies & toddlers of prostitutes while they work. These sex workers have no way to look after their babies or toddlers while they work, so our centers are essential to the nurture, upbringing & worldview for these lovely treasures! Jesus talks about caring for Him when we look after “the least of these” in Matthew 24.

Be sure to watch my blog over the next week as I visit Bangledesh to bring love & light to the least of these!

Christian for profit corporations in America have been holding their breath, waiting for the Supreme Court ruling on the Hobby Lobby case related to the Affordable Care Act & contraception. This topic has been hotly contested saying that women’s reproductive rights have been infringed upon and others advocating that the government should not have the power to govern decisions of for profit organizations pertaining to the corporations religious beliefs, specifically related to contraception.

This is an interesting topic for me as I just returned from India to look at expanding nightcare with Saving Moses to our 2nd country. I visited a few red light districts and learned that even though some sex workers have unionized and are putting pressure on the clients to use condoms, the individual sex worker is still largely at the mercy of her economic condition, being able to earn more money through unprotected sex rather than requiring her clients to wear this protection. On the heels of trying to wrap my head around the daily survival efforts of sex workers in India, I’m home in the US and we are grappling with forcing private businesses to comply with government regulations that oppose their religious convictions. We live in an interesting world and my take away on this, at this point isn’t very sophisticated nor intellectually engaging – my take away is that I want to genuinely love well 🙂

When I look at Jesus’ life & words, it seems to me that He made folk either super happy or super ticked. He frequently made the religious establishment of His day really upset with how He confronted their hypocrisy & double standards. On the flip side, He readily embraced & accepted those who were marginalized, unpopular & even semi-rogue-ish. Jesus was known as a friend of sinners. So in my thinking as it relates to our modern living, it seems to me that if I’m going to follow Jesus, then it’s important to authentically connect with people who have been marginalized, those who are less popular and even some folk who could be considered renegades. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I love what Saving Moses does with our nightcare program, where we take care of the babies of sex workers while their moms work. Some people think of this kind of help in terms of fostering prostitution, empowering fornication or enabling seedy living. I prefer to see nightcare as a way to genuinely love these babies, who are easily the least of the least in our modern world 🙂